Disabled Parity Drive - 99% sure it's a bad cable but I'm a noob so I'm going to ask anyway

[GalaxyBird]

Hello!

 

Just tried setting up unraid for the first time ever, and when I turned it on, the parity drive immediately went into a disabled state. I ran a read-check wondering if maybe the Parity drive just starts in a failed state until you've completed the first check. Unfortunately, that didn't fix it.

 

I turned off the computer and checked all of the power and data connections, rebooted, and still the same issue.

 

I then swapped out the drive for an alternate, and tried to restart the array with the new parity drive and it failed immediately as well.

 

I then swapped the SATA cable with one of the other drives, and that drive that was now on the "bad cable" was then in a failed state.

 

I've ordered a replacement cable, but wanted to post my logs here to see if there was something else I should be trying to do

Edited September 26, 2020 by GalaxyBird

[GalaxyBird]

tower-smart-20200926-1615.ziptower-diagnostics-20200926-1621.zip

[GalaxyBird]

My partner actually just suggested restarting but with only 7 drives active. So a parity + 6, and then adding the 7th later once I've got a working cable (or have assessed the issue is with the NAS case backplane possible?).  Is that feasible?

 

Looking around, it seems like re-creating the bootable drive is the key (

) but I'm not sure if I need to do that or not. I certainly don't need to follow data loss precautions since all of these drives are fresh.

[trurl]

8 minutes ago, GalaxyBird said:

suggested restarting but with only 7 drives active.

If you want to shrink the array, go to Tools - New Config, keep all assignments, then before starting the array, make any changes you want such as removing a drive. Then start the array and let it rebuild parity. Be sure you don't assign a data disk to a parity slot or it will be overwritten by parity.